We had the opportunity to attend ADP's ReThink conference, held from January 29th till 31st 2019 in Berlin. Attendance was over 250 attendees, it is a pretty exclusive event. ADP always does an interesting statistic., it aggregates the payrolls spend through its systems for these customer and the mark was at over 7B+. Impressive.
Prefer to watch – here is my event video … (if the video doesn't' show up – check here)
Here is the 1 slide condensation (if the slide doesn't show up, check here):
Want to read on? Here you go:
A great event – ReThink is one of the top, if not the top event I have the privilege to attend. Everything about this event is very, very well done. Starting with an easy registration, well organized travel, great locations, very senior attendees, high caliber speakers (this edition as CNN's Fareed Zakaria, fresh from Davos, David Miliband (now CEO of the International Rescue Committee) and Peter Gabriel (not just as musician, but mostly as human rights activist). In between ADP customers share their stories, remarkably in a consistent format. ADP messaging was at a minimal with Don Weinstein sharing product vision and Marcus Buckingham the latest ADP Research Institute findings. An event I always look forward to.
Customer Success – ADP customers are successful on the ADP products for global payroll, mostly GlobalView. In the formal presentation as well as informal side conversation, it is clear that ADP customers are doing well with this complex automation challenge. New capabilities like Celergo are something they look forward to explore and use. The 'star' of the presentations was certainly Microsoft which is almost done consolidating its payrolls on ADP. ADP made clear that its global payroll offerings work for small enterprises (smallest was about 3k employees) to the largest ones (in the 6-digit figures).
Last year WorkMarket, this year back to TMBC – In the past two years ADP acquired the two aforementioned vendors right before ReThink and the vendors were an integral part of the presentations and demos. The last acquisition was Celergo, and it deems itself less to present than the other two, but Celergo founder Michele Honemichl was on stage and is the new head of payroll strategy at ADP. So, it was back to one of the best presenters in the industry, Marcus Buckingham, to share the newest findings of the ADP Research Institute… Not surprisingly, embedded into this message is to use TMBC and the overall benefits were re-enforced by a presentation by Cisco, a long time TMBC customer.
Experience exchanges matter to customers – Talking to attendees the single most consistent feedback was that they learnt a lot from each other. As it should be, but it also points to an area where ADP can improve, helping its global customers to connect better. They also could take the initiative and form a user group.
MyPOV
An excellent event to attend to get the pulse on where enterprises are with their global HR / payroll projects, one of the most challenging enterprise automation topics. Not just because being global, but also because of the massive responsibility in regards of employee financial wellbeing, the constant changes in legislation and lastly the challenging exercise to make software work for some very small employee populations around the globe. ADP now must show how Celergo will help customers, it became clear that what originally was positioned as a talent "acquihire" has also some software assets under the hood. All the better for ADP customers, but they want to see the new value – as soon as possible.ADP deliberately tunes the product message down, and while there are demo stations to see the products, it certainly will be good to see what further innovation is coming from ADP soon, what tangible capabilities customers can count on later in 2019 / the not too distant future. ADP did this in past editions of ReThink, it will be good to revive this in 2020.
The real downside is only… it's 51 or so weeks to ADP ReThink 2020.